Archives de catégorie : Publications

BERRY DRAGO Elisabeth, Painted Alchemists : Early Modern Artistry and Experiment in the Work of Thomas Wijck, Amsterdam, Amsterdam university press, 2019, 320 p.

Présentation de l’éditeur :

Thomas Wijck’s painted alchemical laboratories were celebrated in his day as “artful” and “ingenious.” They fell into obscurity along with their subject, as alchemy came to be viewed as an occult art or a fool’s errand. But these unusual pictures challenge our understanding of early modern alchemy-and of the deeper relationship between chemical workshops and the artists who represented them. The work of artists, like the work of alchemists, contained intellectual-creative and manual-material aspects. Both alchemists and artists claimed a special status owing to their creative powers. Wijck’s formation of an artistic and professional identity around alchemical themes reveals his desire to explore this curious territory, and ultimately to demonstrate art’s superior claims to knowledge and mastery over nature. This book explores one artist’s transformation of alchemy and its materials into a reputation for virtuosity-and what his work can teach us about the experimental early modern world.

LEV-ER Ornet, Still-Life as Portrait in Early Modern Italy : Baschenis, Bettera and the Painting of Cultural Identity, Amsterdam, Amsterdam university press, 2019, 304 p.

Présentation de l’éditeur :

Still-Life as Portrait in Early Modern Italy centers on the still-life compositions created by Evaristo Baschenis and Bartolomeo Bettera, two 17th-century painters living and working in the Italian city of Bergamo. This highly original study explores how these paintings form a dynamic network in which artworks, musical instruments, books, and scientific apparatuses constitute links to a dazzling range of figures and sources of knowledge. Putting into circulation a wealth of cultural information and ideas and mapping a complex web of social and intellectual relations, these works paint a portrait of both their creators and their patrons, while enacting a lively debate among humanist thinkers, aristocrats, politicians, and artists. Continuer la lecture →

With its idiosyncratic yet unmistakable adaptation of European Baroque models, the eighteenth-century architecture of Istanbul has frequently been dismissed by modern observers as inauthentic and derivative, a view reflecting broader unease with notions of Western influence on Islamic cultures. In Ottoman Baroque—the first English-language book on the topic—Unver Rustem provides a compelling reassessment of this building style and shows how between 1740 and 1800 the Ottomans consciously coopted European forms to craft a new, politically charged, and globally resonant image for their empire’s capital. Continuer la lecture →

A royal physician and fellow of the Royal Society, Martin Lister was an extraordinarily prolific natural historian with an expertise in shells and mollusks. Disappointed with the work of established artists, Lister decided to teach his daughters, Susanna and Anna, how to illustrate images of the specimens he studied. The sisters became so skilled that Lister entrusted them with his great work, Historiæ Conchyliorum, assembled between 1685 and 1692. This first comprehensive study of conchology consisted of more than one thousand copperplates of shells and mollusks collected from around the world. Martin Lister and his Remarkable Daughtersreconstructs the creation of this masterwork, presenting original drawings, engraved copperplates, draft prints, and photographs of the finished books.

Susanna and Anna portrayed the shells of this collection not only as curious and beautiful objects, but also as specimens of natural history, rendering them with sensitivity and keen scientific empiricism. Beautiful in their own right, their illustrations and engravings reveal the early techniques behind scientific illustration and offer fascinating insight into the often hidden role of women in the scientific revolution.

Anna Marie Roos is a reader in the history of science and medicine at the University of Lincoln.

In eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often represented using slang, symbolism, and wordplay. In this book, literary critic Noelle Gallagher explores the cultural significance of the ‘clap’ (gonorrhea), the ‘pox’ (syphilis), and the ‘itch’ (genital scabies) for the development of eighteenth-century British literature and art. As a condition both represented through metaphors and used as a metaphor, venereal disease provided a vehicle for the discussion of cultural anxieties about gender, race, commerce, and immigration. Gallagher highlights four key concepts associated with venereal disease, demonstrating how infection’s symbolic potency was enhanced by its links to elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and facial deformities. Casting light where the sun rarely shines, this study will fascinate anyone interested in the history of literature, art, medicine, and sexuality. Continuer la lecture →

Art Crossing Borders offers a thought-provoking analysis of the internationalisation of the art market during the long nineteenth century. Twelve experts, dealing with a wide variety of geographical, temporal, and commercial contexts, explore how the gradual integration of art markets structurally depended on the simultaneous rise of nationalist modes of thinking, in unexpected and ambiguous ways. Continuer la lecture →

Dealing with a complex king, this edited collection elucidates a monarch’s vision of Rome that deeply affected his political choices and cultural policy during the first half of the eighteenth-century. John (João) V of Portugal (1689–1750) became king in 1707 in a pivotal moment for the European balance of power. The Kingdom of Portugal was still demanding the same privileges as its powerful neighbours and the relation with Rome was considered a vehicle to obtain them. Arts and music had a special and unprecedented place in the king’s plans and this book approaches that dynamic from several interdisciplinary perspectives. Continuer la lecture →

While the connected, international character of today’s art world is well known, the eighteenth century too had a global art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to attempt a map of the global art world of the eighteenth century. Fourteen essays from a distinguished group of scholars explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the eighteenth century. Continuer la lecture →

Romeyn de Hooghe was the most inventive and prolific etcher of the later Dutch Golden Age. The producer of wide-ranging book illustrations, newsprints, allegories, and satire, he is best known as the chief propaganda artist working for stadtholder and king William III. This study, the first book-length biography of de Hooghe, narrates how his reputation became badly tarnished when he was accused of pornography, fraud, larceny, and atheism. Traditionally regarded as a godless rogue, and more recently as an exponent of the Radical Enlightenment, de Hooghe emerges in this study as a successful entrepreneur, a social climber, and an Orangist spin doctor. A study in seventeenth-century political culture and patronage, focusing on spin and slander, this book explores how artists, politicians, and hacks employed literature and the visual arts in political discourse, and tried to capture their readership with satire, mockery, fun, and laughter. Continuer la lecture →